Alan Cassels on The Modern Medical Nemesis — How Disease Mongering, Overdiagnosis, and Overprescribing are Keeping Patients Hooked

We’re joined by our friend Alan Cassels, a drug-policy researcher and author whose work examines the intersection of pharmaceutical marketing, medical research, public policy, and informed consent in healthcare. Alan is a health-policy researcher, journalist and author of several books, including international bestseller Selling Sickness: How the World’s Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All Into Patients, which he co-authored with journalist Ray Moynihan. The book examines how pharmaceutical companies can expand the boundaries of illness, market conditions to the public, and turn healthy people into sick patients—a practice known as disease mongering. The book has been translated into multiple languages and helped bring this issue to a much wider audience.

In the debut episode, A Bad Way to Die, Pam Popper and Heidi Plumb explore what can happen when we blindly follow medical recommendations and outsource our healthcare decisions to others. Heidi shares her personal journey into INFORMED Medical Decision-Making, including her experience with a fake diagnosis. Together, Pam and Heidi discuss what meaningful informed consent should look like, why patients need to ask questions and understand their options, and how the INFORMED model can help people become active participants in their healthcare. Because a diagnosis and a recommendation are only the beginning of the conversation—and the decisions we make can have life-changing consequences.